


lay in ruins

by starstrung



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 19:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7654150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something about stepping into the Void that is much like being asked to give up pistol and sword before stepping into a room. That same feeling of loss, that same moment of recalibration. Only instead of his weapons, he is being asked to relinquish his wits, his hold on reality, the feeling of solid ground under his feet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lay in ruins

It’s hard to say why the memory comes to him there, sitting in shackles in his cell. He remembers climbing into Jessamine’s room through the window. Her back had been turned to him, but he knew that she was aware of his arrival from the way she smiled at herself in the mirror, turned the smallest degree so he could see the long line of her neck, the curve of her back, as she slipped out of her jacket.

That had been before Emily had been born. He had forgotten.

“All is well?” she had asked, when he had finally been unable to hold himself still, had gone to her.

“All is well,” he had replied, bowing his head to kiss her.

There among the rats and the smell of human excrement, he slips in and out of consciousness without knowing which is which. He sees glimpses of Jessamine again, but nothing as sharp as that particular memory. Every movement he makes pulls him out of his haze with pain, before he slips back again. His torturer had seemed particularly inspired yesterday, had carved new and dizzying lines into his flesh. 

He wonders, without any hope, how much longer it will take him to die here.

If only he could wrap his hands around the throat of the man who killed Jessamine, who took away Emily. With a flash of loathing and anger, he pulls at his shackles, sending them taut against his wrists. He strains against them for half a moment, eyes wild, before going limp again.

As he slips into unconsciousness again, he feels cool hands cupping his jaw, lifting it up as if to examine his face. He tries to open his eyes, but it is as if clouds of white mist obscure his vision. He leans into the touch, thinking of Jessamine, of fog in the morning at Dunwall Tower, of Emily calling his name.

“You still love them so much, don’t you, Corvo,” a voice says. It does not belong to Jessamine, or to any of the guards. It is too smooth, words gliding one after another relentlessly. “You’ll make it out soon. But will it be through the Void, or will you leave Coldridge alive? I suppose we’ll find out.”

The white mist leaves. The hands around his face melt away. His head slumps forward across his shoulders and he loses all awareness of his surroundings once again.

-

The guard turns his back to Corvo to walk down the hall, whistling as he goes, and Corvo follows after him like a shadow. One silent, smooth movement, and he slits the guard’s throat with his sword. The whistling tune is cut short mid-note as the guard gurgles in confusion, too surprised even to try to turn his head, and in a moment, he is sagging in Corvo’s arms. 

Dragging the body into a nearby lavatory, Corvo piles it on top of a toilet. There is nothing he can do to hide the blood and the obvious lifelessness of the corpse, but at least no guard will come across it in the halls. Here, in the Golden Cat, they are relaxed and unguarded, and it best serves his purpose to keep it that way. 

He is about to turn to leave when he catches his reflection in the mirror. 

The mask looks frightening, even to him. Its metal face seems twisted into an awful grin, and there’s something skull-like in the way the eyes are cast in shadow. Only the smallest glints of reflected light from the inset lenses are visible from those darkened pits. 

It’s the perfect face for an assassin, he thinks grimly, one that fits him perfectly. There is very little humanity in it, more monstrous to him than even the face the Outsider chooses to wear, and Corvo remembers how  _ he  _ looks all too well.

But even without his mask, his dark coat is soaked in blood from the guards he eliminated on his way here. He cannot face Emily this way.

He tries to wash off the blood coating his hands in the sink, wetting the cuffs of his coat. He gets some of it off, but it is caked under his nails, stained into his sleeves. The corpse behind him — its head bent against the wall, eyes open in shock and its jaw slack — seems to mock his attempts.

With something like trepidation tightening his chest, he leaves the lavatory and goes to the room where he knows Emily is being held. He opens the door.

And there she is. Safe. Alive. She stands up, and faces him.

“Who is it? Why are you wearing that mask?” she asks, brave as always. Already asking him questions. He loves her so much that his hands shake as he takes off his mask.

“Corvo!” And she is running into his arms, as if the six months haven’t happened. As if he hasn’t killed men he used to serve with just to get to her. He lifts her up and they spin, and for a moment, all is well.

-

“She still has such terrible dreams,” Callista tells him in an undertone. There is no pity in her voice, only concern, and Corvo approves. Away from them, Emily colors her drawing with what is possibly the most fixed look of concentration he has seen her make. 

Corvo will have to teach Emily how to eavesdrop less obviously.

“Mr. Corvo,” Callista sighs, as if sensing his divided attention. “Could I ask you to stay with her until she sleeps? She seems braver when you’re with her. It’s fine when she’s talking, but then she’ll just go quiet, and I don’t—” Callista shrugs helplessly, real distress on her face.

“I’ll stay with her,” he promises.

Emily’s face brightens when he goes to her. She shifts so that he can sit beside her and see what she has been drawing. It is Emily’s tower, the ocean falling in waves against its side. In the topmost room, Emily has drawn herself, Corvo, and a frowning figure that Corvo can only assume is Callista.

“Towers,” Emily says thoughtfully, adding a gull flying low across the sea. “I always live in towers. Except for in the Golden Cat, but that doesn’t count.”

“Don’t you like towers?” he asks her, gently. Jessamine’s heart beats steadily against his own. He should not have brought it with him when he came to visit Emily, but he has found that it is more and more difficult for him to leave the Heart behind.

Emily shrugs. “There are quite a lot of stairs, is all.” And he has to concede that point to her.

She falls asleep tucked against his side in the middle of telling him about an offensively useless book that Callista made her read and, trying not to feel grateful, he draws the covers over her and blows out the candles.

When he stands, his bones feel disjointed with exhaustion. He has seen too many sunrises without enough rest, and yet he is reluctant to go far from Emily. He climbs to the roof of her tower, arms unwieldy with accumulated exertion that he hasn’t noticed until now. 

Atop the tower, he can see the wind cresting alongside the ocean currents. Farther into the horizon, the distant lights of Dunwall cut through the fog. He presses his palm against the Heart kept in his coat, and thinks he can feel Jessamine’s homesickness mirrored next to his own.

It is difficult to feel safe this close to the place where he saw the Empire fall. To Corvo, this tower feels balanced against an invisible force threatening to give way at any moment, while things with sharp teeth and ready hunger wait in the dark waters below. Try as he might, he cannot shake this dread, even though he knows no safer place he can take Emily. 

There is nothing to do for him but to keep watch, and to wait.

-

But it seems the Outsider is not done with him today.

Like a lullaby sung in a distant room, he hears half-muted whalesong calling to him. It puzzles him, because he knows that whales do not come this close to land. There is nothing that can get past the swarm of whaling trawlers and their hooks. 

He listens to it for too long, transfixed by the unearthly, haunted sound of it, and so he doesn’t notice at first that the tower has disappeared from under him.

There is something about stepping into the Void that is much like being asked to give up pistol and sword before stepping into a room. That same feeling of loss, that same moment of recalibration. Only instead of his weapons, he is being asked to relinquish his wits, his hold on reality, the feeling of solid ground under his feet.

Well, perhaps “asked” is not the word for it. The Outsider has never  _ asked _ him for permission, Corvo thinks as he deliberately turns his back on the gazebo. Like always, its stonework hangs suspended in segments around it, the foundations of it exposed and crumbling as it floats in the sea of strange white fog.

He already knows what he will find under that gazebo.

Instead, Corvo heads in the opposite direction, down a segment of a street lit by glowing lamps, set with loosened cobblestones that depress beneath his feat. 

A sea-beaten cliff rises up out of the mist to block his way and, setting his jaw stubbornly, Corvo uses his powers to scale it. Embedded in the cliffside he finds a ship’s figurehead draped in kelp, her wooden arms outstretched and her hands weathered into stumps. As Corvo passes by on his way up, he can smell her rotting.

At the top he finds what could be the remnants of a sunken ship’s cabin: velvet-upholstered furniture and a solid oak desk curtained by peeling sea charts. A gaping piano sits in the middle, its yellowed whale bone keys spreading up from the lip of it in a lopsided spiral, the topmost one risen far above his reach. 

Despite himself, Corvo feels a wonder of this place. It is mysterious, arbitrary, but then so is the creature who rules here.

Jessamine used to play on a piano much like this one, albeit less deconstructed. She used to say that playing for him was one of the only ways to get him to stop scenting the air like a bloodhound. Although, Corvo thinks with a smile, he can recount much more enjoyable distractions in their time together. Jessamine’s musical talent was much more enthusiastic than anything else.

He strikes upon a key floating at the level of his chest and, unconnected to hammer or string, it produces a clear ringing noise that seems to go on for a solid minute, echoing into infinity.

As if in response, he feels an insistent tugging, the same feeling of unrest he associates with nearby runes, guiding him to them with their songs. He considers, briefly, going the other way. Finding the edge of the Void, if it has one, and looking over it.

But he knows he cannot. Corvo sighs, turning towards the tugging, growing more impatient and unamused the longer he waits. He lets himself be drawn in that direction, rapidly Blinking across the gaps without paying attention to whatever curiosities pass him by. 

Finally, he stands in the middle of a town’s plaza, narrowly avoiding the spray of a fountain as it sends water endlessly over the edge and into the empty depths below. Corvo walks deeper into the plaza’s center. The town looks surprisingly mundane despite its current location in the Void. 

“Corvo,” a voice says at his back, and he goes still. “It’s not like you to keep me waiting.”

A thrill up his back at the hint of displeasure in the Outsider’s voice. Corvo cannot say why it is so satisfying to hear it. Perhaps it is his unrelenting weariness, and the steepening mountain of bodies he is climbing to put Emily on the throne. 

Perhaps it is some form of madness caused by his Mark, by the runes and the bone charms singing to him when he tries to sleep until he wants to throw them into the ocean. Perhaps it is because he  _ can’t _ throw them into the ocean, needs their power too much.

Perhaps he simply wants to see how far he can push.

“You could have appeared to me any time,” Corvo says, keeping his voice level. “You chose not to.”

“Would you have me greet you as you arrive? Who do you think is master of this place?” The Outsider speaks into his ear, and Corvo cannot help the hairs that rise up on his neck. 

“You will have an eternity of time to see the Void when you have passed, Corvo,” the Outsider continues. “In the meantime, don’t forget what you’ve set out to do.” Still that coolness, still that unshaken dispassion. 

Frustration grants him renewed recklessness. “I haven’t forgotten,” he says, roughly. “I don’t need you to remind me.”

Corvo has heard approval in the Outsider’s voice before, has heard fascination, boredom, disinterest, and curiosity. He has not before heard it go low and menacing, sprouting reverberations that seem to amplify in the quivering veil of the Void and become something too discordant to be human.

“You don’t want to test me, my dear Corvo,” it says, unsettling in its calmness. “Don’t forget that you’ve taken my gifts, and gladly.”

In the window of a nearby building he sees a fragmented reflection of what lies behind him. It is no shape he recognizes. It is hideous and sprawling, and suddenly he can feel fear like some vital flesh of his has calcified in his chest. Every quickened breath he takes dislodges it briefly, presses it tight against his ribs. Corvo cannot speak.

“I can take this away,” the Outsider says, with a strange gentleness, and suddenly Corvo’s Mark burns bright on the back of his hand like it did when it was first given to him. Once again, it feels like the skin of his left arm is being stretched towards the Mark on his hand, like it is threatening to pull him inside out. 

“Although I can’t say that you’ll be completely whole afterwards,” the Outsider adds.

The sensation builds until it is too much to bear, until Corvo feels like he is being consumed by it. Under no compulsion but his own, he turns to face the Outsider.

-

Corvo has never stood close to a whale while it was alive, but he has heard tales from whalers of seeing their friends savaged by those great teeth, of being tormented by the intelligence they saw in those eyes.

That is, perhaps, the closest he can come to describing what he sees as he stares into the face of the leviathan. Corvo can sense with a disconnected clarity how easily his mind could be lost to this.

He must move, he must walk forward. He looks down and there, at his feet, lies the plunging abyss, singing to him like a thousand runes have never sung to him. It would be easy — it would even be just, he thinks. No one should be asked to live with what he has seen, what he is seeing.

But Emily. But his daughter.

He stumbles away from the edge, and in an instant, the leviathan retreats, rearing back upon itself.

“Corvo,” it sighs.

-

And then the Outsider is himself again. But no, Corvo knows differently now. The Outsider is as much the leviathan as he is the ageless man, wreathed in black smoke. And Corvo will never stop being able to see the truth of what he is in those infernal black eyes.

“Oh, Corvo,” the Outsider sighs to him again, something in his tone pleased, and Corvo cannot help the rush of relief at being forgiven. “You did ask for it. You did choose to see. Consider it a boon.”

A boon. Corvo finds that he is shaking uncontrollably, the tremors blurring his vision. Did he want this boon, he asks himself, and is surprised to find that the answer is yes. He’s just not sure that he’s survived it yet.

To his surprise, the Outsider embraces him. Or, whatever can be counted as an embrace by the Outsider’s standards. One pale hand settles at his shoulder, the other at the back of his head, fingers ghosting through his hair. 

Corvo still shakes, the smoke that cloaks the Outsider enveloping him, but he is slowly gaining control of himself. The Outsider hums low with approval, and Corvo feels like a soothed animal.

“You felt your own mind bend, but it didn’t yield, did it?” the Outsider says, voice lovely with fascination. “Few men have seen what you have seen and not chosen oblivion afterwards. You always do manage to surprise me, in the end.”

As soon as he can move again, Corvo draws back. The Outsider releases him easily.

“You called me here,” Corvo reminds him. Still unsettled by the Outsider’s eyes, he avoids looking at them, and keeps his head bowed instead. “What did you want of me?”

From the corner of his eye, Corvo sees the Outsider tilt his head. It is difficult to imagine him looking anything but smug. “I did not call you here. Not everything in the Void is brought to it by my bidding. Sometimes things,” and he pauses, as if searching for a phrase, “wash up on its shores.”

Corvo thinks of the rotting figurehead, of the piano and its stairway of keys. If he had stepped forward over the edge, would he have ended up like that?

He dares a look up, still avoiding those eyes, and the Outsider is smiling, as if sensing his thoughts.

The black smoke that usually wreaths the Outsider’s form curls out from him, reaching towards Corvo again, and this time Corvo does not step away, but lets that inky blackness swallow him until he can’t see anything. 

Corvo tries not to breathe it in and fails, drawing thick, choking coils of it into his lungs. He coughs instinctively, but the smoke seems to equilibrate, settling heavy and cold inside his chest. If this is what it feels like to drown, Corvo finds that he can abide it.

It feels like being held, like being cradled. In the darkness, Corvo becomes aware of fingers tracing the lines of his face, the circles of his eyes, as if bearing witness to the signs that the last months have left on him. The fingers move, startlingly, to his lips, and he opens his mouth to accept them. He closes his lips around the knuckles, tastes salty brine.

“Oh,” a voice says, soft and wondering, and the Outsider removes his fingers to kiss him.

The smoke is filling all of him, now. Corvo thinks even his blood is running icy with it. The Outsider kisses him, a hand around his throat to keep him still, and Corvo tries to remember the last time he breathed clean air. A minute? Two minutes? Will he choke like this? But it doesn’t matter. He is in the leviathan’s arms now.

“You know you shouldn’t wander here,” the Outsider says, as Corvo feels the fastenings of his trousers being undone. Corvo’s mind, slowed with lack of air, with desire, struggles to understand what he means. Ah, yes. The sea-beaten cliff. The sunken ship’s cabin. 

“I am not the only thing that calls this place home, Corvo. Creatures far less generous than me,” the Outsider says. He twists his hand around Corvo’s cock, and Corvo’s head falls back, his eyes open and sightless, sound stopped from leaving his throat by the weighted darkness.


End file.
